The invention relates to the field of Internet security.
Internet visitor traffic is an expensive commodity. Advertisers, Internet marketers, and other players all compete on gaining visitor attention, which can later be translated into monetary profits. These players profit from visitors clicking on advertisements, filling in “business lead” forms, downloading software, etc.
Some malicious players opt to illegitimately direct Internet users to their own content, by redirecting them, without their knowledge, to these players' own resources—web sites, software download links, and the like.
Such illegitimate attacks oftentimes utilize online advertisements as their attack vector. The advertisements may be included with sophisticated HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and/or JavaScript programming, that causes a visitor's web browser to redirect to the attacker's desired resource without any intentional action by the visitor. This is true both for regular desktop web browsers, as well as browsers embedded in software applications (“apps”) on mobile devices, where they are used to fetch external contents such as advertisements displayed next to the regular content of the app. In software apps, attacks also often include installation of unwanted software or viruses, displaying of unwanted content, or extraction of personal information from the portable computing device, to name a few examples.
Online advertising networks and online advertising exchanges, because of the sheer amount of advertisements they constantly serve, are often exploited by malicious players for distribution of their malicious advertisements.
The foregoing examples of the related art and limitations related therewith are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of the related art will become apparent to those of skill in the art upon a reading of the specification and a study of the figures.